In 1992, long-time friends and schoolmates, Michael Karp and Bob Reed, decided to open their own business and take the financial recruiting world by storm. They hired a team of professionals and proceeded to help identify potential clients and place candidates in IT. This was back at a time when pre-Soviet-era technologies were still being deployed and operated among trading rooms of banks.

The team understood the world would evolve. They focused their efforts on creating partnerships with the university professors of the world who taught PhD level courses at the most respected universities, from Ecole Politechnique in France to Oxford in England or MIT and Cornell in the US. Those university professors referred their top PhD graduating students who were then referred to the world’s best traders. They initially began their careers as quantitative researchers supporting trading with the validation and origination of trade ideas in things like relative value fixed income, derivative pricing and quantitative trading. These PhDs then went on to become some of the world’s strongest traders and heads of businesses. Today they are our clients.